Madonna is opening up about the strained relationship she had with her oldest daughter, Lourdes “Lola” Leon—and how writing music together helped bring them back together.
“The song I wrote with my daughter, Lola. She approached me about writing a song together as a way to heal our relationship,” Madonna told Interview Magazine.
“It was a really important moment, and it solidified the idea that now is the time to make this record,” Madonna added, explaining how the two came to co-write “Good for the Soul” for her upcoming album, Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II.
According to the now 29-year-old singer, whom Madonna shares with ex Carlos Leon, the “Papa Don’t Preach” star was a “control freak.”
Lourdes told Interview Magazine in 2021 that her mother “controlled me my whole life,” revealing that she paid her own way through college rather than relying on her wealthy mother after becoming independent at 18.
These characterizations are nothing new for the Queen of Pop, who was also involved in a contentious legal battle over her oldest son, Rocco, with ex-husband Guy Ritchie in the mid-2010s.
Reports at the time stated that the 15-year-old wanted to stay in London with his father because of Madonna’s “strict style of parenting.”
After a months-long transatlantic legal battle, Rocco was allowed to live in London with his father, and judges asked both parents to settle the matter out of court.
Since then, it appears that the parent and child, 25, have reconciled, but Madonna shared in a 2025 interview that the ordeal made her consider suicide.
“Someone trying to take my child away from me was like, they might as well just kill me,” she said in an interview on On Purpose with Jay Shetty, about the unsettling experience.
The singer has four adopted children, in addition to Rocco and Lola.
Madonna said that Confessions II, which is set to be released on July 3, is mainly based on her “family trauma.”
“It’s hard for me to write a song about nothing. I have to tell a story. So I wrote about a lot of family trauma, and then we started making dance music,” Madonna said, revealing the inspiration for her new work.
“I had a lot of stuff going on in my life personally. My brother was very, very, very ill, and my stepmother, with whom I’d had a very traumatic relationship throughout my entire childhood, had just died,” she added.
The star has previously said that she had a “difficult” relationship with her stepmother, Joan Ciccone, and “didn’t accept her” while growing up, after her father remarried following her birth mother’s death when she was just five years old.
Madonna’s brother, Christopher Ciccone, died of cancer in October 2024, less than a month after Joan’s passing in September.
